Category: Tales of Gargentihr

What is it about Scottish RPG publishers and offbeat game settings? Contested Ground Studios had A|State, Nightfall Games gave us SLA Industries, and – perhaps most obscurely of all – Sanctuary Games put out Tales of Gargentihr, which gets its elitist on with its front cover defiantly declaring the subject matter of the game to be REAL FANTASY (the implication being that your run of the mill sub-Tolkien D&D knockoff setting constitutes FAKE FANTASY).

Sanctuary Games put out its sole product – the Gargentihr core book – in 1994, and so far as I can make out went out of business almost immediately. The game was picked up by Digital Animations, who after negotiating a US distribution deal with Mind Ventures and reprinting the core book (John Kim’s RPG encyclopedia refers to this as a 2nd edition, though I have found no evidence that its contents differ from the Sanctuary Games version and according to archive.org’s snapshots of Mind Ventures’ website the version of the core book they were distributing had the same page count as the original edition) seemed to do barely anything with the property beyond putting out an adventure as a PDF (on floppy disk, of all things). Rumours percolated that there was a computer game in the works, but with neither company active in the RPG or videogame businesses these days it’s hard to imagine that a revival of the IP is coming any time soon. (Apparently someone at Chronicle City put feelers out towards maybe getting a revival going, but wasn’t able to negotiate a workable way forward.)